A Homemade Life (12 page)

W
hen someone in the neighborhood is dying, no one really knows what to do. The very brave come by to sit and visit. Others, more tentative, keep their sympathies to the phone. When my father was dying, we had a little of both. We had friends who came by and friends who called. But mainly, we had friends who cooked.

If there was anything good about that time, anything to be missed after the fact, it was the constant influx of soups, stews, roasts, cookies, and pies. I never knew how many friends my parents had until the food started arriving. The neighbors walked over with a tureen of beef stew. A bag of sugar cookies showed up, propped against the side door. A friend arrived with a car full of aluminum pans and cake boxes, enough to line the entire kitchen counter. I've never seen so much food outside of a college dining hall.

Everyone who cooked or baked for us hoped, I know, that my father would eat some, too. Sometimes he did. But mainly he ate eggs and hot cereal and cans of Ensure. (Not that he
ate
the cans, but if you've seen how thick and opaque Ensure is, you'll understand why I put it under the “eating” category, rather than the “drinking” one.) The vanilla flavor was his favorite. It smelled like a mixture of milk and chalk dust. It smelled wet and musty and oddly sweet, like nursing homes and old people, and after he would drink it, his breath would
smell sweet, too. My mother told me once that he'd said to her, without the slightest wink of sarcasm, that vanilla-flavored Ensure tasted like crème brûlée. He
loved
crème brûlée. We used to joke about it. We'd retell the story to one another, laughing, saying, “Shit, if that tastes like crème brûlée, he must
really
be sick.” Then, for a minute, we could forget that he was.

People took such good care of us. I can hardly tell you. It was almost comical, like something out of a sitcom or
Steel Magnolias.
There were loaves of bread and cold cuts and cheese, potato soup, and pork tenderloins. Linda Paschal brought her banana bread and her holiday sweet rolls. Barbara Fretwell brought a dried fruit pie. John Hughey, a family friend whose homemade bisteeya, chocolate bread pudding, and penchant for deep frying have made him a small-scale legend, brought over handmade tamales. Pam and David Fleischaker, old friends, brought two pies: first a fruit one and then a rum cream, topped with pistachios and bits of shaved chocolate. We ate it all.

When Thanksgiving rolled around, things quieted down for a few days. We were on our own, just me, Mom, and Burg. My brother David called from Washington, D.C., and had a local restaurant deliver our holiday dinner: half a roasted turkey, a pan of green beans almondine, mashed yams, stuffing, and pecan pie. I don't know what we would have eaten otherwise. Mom and I stood at the counter, surveying it all, peeking under the lids of the aluminum to-go containers and inhaling the familiar smells that rose on the steam.

I remember thinking that Burg wouldn't make it through the weekend. He had stopped eating. He was fading. I don't know how else to say it. You get a sense for these things. I remember talking on the phone, telling someone that he was dying. I must have had the conversation while standing in the pantry closet, because when I think of it now, I picture a row of jam jars and single-serving cans of pineapple juice. The pantry was where I went for privacy. The door had a latch on the inside, so I could safely close myself in when I needed to talk without anyone hearing me. Saying it aloud—
I don't think he's going to make it
—was almost a relief. It had been barely two months since his diagno
sis, but we were exhausted. I wanted something to change: the hum from the motor on his hospital bed, the nurses that came and went, the sweet smell on his breath, something.

 

Early one morning, I woke to the sound of him shouting. He was babbling the way babies do, but at the top of his lungs, hooting and twittering and carrying on. It was a Friday morning, the sixth of December. Everybody else was asleep: my brothers in my bedroom, my sister in the guest room, my mom and my aunt Tina together in my parents' bed. I was sleeping on the floor in the hallway, on the foam egg-crate mattress that had lined his stretcher on the ride home from the hospital, with our dog and a couple of blankets. My stretch of the hallway was squarely above the den, where my father was, and with my head just a pillow's width from the floor, I could hear almost everything in the room below, like listening through a wall with a paper cup pressed to my ear.

Laura, the night nurse, was with him, and by the faint daylight that came through the curtains, I guessed she was probably giving him a sponge bath, her last duty before handing him over to LuDean, the day nurse. But this kind of noise was odd. His voice was almost singsong, but with an edge of panic, as though he were reciting a nursery rhyme in another language while drunk.

I tossed back the blanket and went to the stairs. When I got to the doorway into the den, I saw that Laura was just finishing his bath, straightening the fitted sheet that lay between him and the mattress. She had propped him on his side, facing the doorway. He didn't seem to be in pain, but his eyes were closed and he was agitated, jerking his head as though trying to shake off a fly, or like a Stevie Wonder video on fast-forward.

I knelt down in front of his face and stroked his beard. It was coarse and thick, a silvery gray.

“Shhh,” I heard myself say, “It's okay.
It's okay.”

It must have been as much for me as it was for him. I tilted my head
to the side to match the angle of his, but he didn't seem to see me. His eyes were squeezed to narrow slits. I stroked his beard, willing his eyes to land on me. Years later, I would have a dream about this. I would be stroking a horse's cheek, but as I stared at it, the horse would morph into my father. I would wake up sobbing.

“You're calling him back, hon,” Laura said. “Don't call him back. He's got the mottling, see?”

She pulled back the blankets that covered his legs. His skin was splotched with patches of reddish purple, like the strawberry birthmark I once saw on the neck of a girl in grade school, only bigger and darker, more angry looking. His knees were knobby and enormous, all shades of pink, purple, and bone white.

I had heard about the mottling. The hospice worker had brought us a little leaflet that mentioned it, a leaflet with the sort of no-nonsense title that, I imagine, is suppose to calm or soothe you in the moments before doom, like
What Happens When We Die.
The mottling is a sign that comes before death, as the circulation starts its slow grind to a halt. LuDean had told me about it, too, one afternoon a week or two earlier, when she'd seen a spot on his ankle.

“He'll get all mottled,” she'd said. “That's how you know he's dying.”

I know it's awful to say it, but I was so relieved that morning, when I saw the splotches. I didn't want to stop him. I was terrified of stopping him. I pulled my hand away from his face. I stood up, ran my fingers down his forearm to smooth the hair, and stepped back. Then I left the room, and I don't remember what I did.

 

That night, I heard Laura at the foot of the stairs. She was calling for my mother.

“Toni,” she said softly, “He's going.” We heard it, each of us in our beds, all the way down the hall, the way a jolt of electricity zips along a wire.

He was lying on his back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling and his
mouth open, gasping. It was a strange sound, his breathing: involuntary, mechanical, ugly. I've since heard people call it “fish-out-of-water breathing,” the way the lungs pull air, almost against their will, into the body. It's a rattletrap sound, a hiccup almost, a frog's ribbit, hard and curt.

We circled his bed. I stood next to Tina, I think. My mother stood next to his head, on the right. We stood there for I don't know how long, maybe half an hour, while he gasped like that. Then his breathing began to slow. At some point, my mother pressed her fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse. And then he went silent. I don't really remember a last breath, although I don't know how anyone does. You never know which one will be the last. He just went, just like that, silent, and then my mother said,
he's gone.

My father died at 2:35 a.m. on Saturday, December 7, 2002, at home, with his children and his wife and his sister-in-law and a night nurse named Laura, with his bed propped against a floor-to-ceiling shelf filled with books on art and history and majolica, the ceramic pottery he collected. He died a few feet from the fireplace he used to sit beside, doing the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

He died the way I guess anyone would want to go: gently in the end, and fast. But sometimes I can't believe what he had to go through to get there, or that he became what he became: a body in a bed, immobilized, melting away. No one sits around and guesses how their parents will die. I certainly didn't. I didn't know that my father would lie down in a hospital bed and never walk again, or that he would stare at me the way he did one day, his blue eyes swimmy and knowing. But he got there. He got through it. And he got out.

I won't tell you that it was hard. You already know that. I was so numb sometimes that my hands stopped working, just locked themselves into funny, pinched fists. But then there was the gratitude, a sort of low-grade, queasy gratitude, that he was free.

 

Sometime around 3:30 that morning, my parents' friends Dick and
Annie came over. We all sat in the den, around the hospital bed, Annie on Dick's lap, telling stories. I sat on a chair next to the bed with the dog on my lap. She tentatively toed the blankets. She'd wanted to climb onto the bed for weeks, but we hadn't let her. Even the slightest movement had made him wince. But now I let her jump. She circled between his knees and fell asleep.

I was hungry, so I went to the kitchen and poured myself a bowl of cereal.

“I don't know how you can possibly eat right now,” someone said.

I don't know what I answered. I even don't know
if
I answered. I just ate. I don't think Burg would have minded. He would have taken a bite himself, if he could.

DRIED FRUIT PIE

Adapted from Barbara Fretwell

“d
ried fruit pie” doesn't quite have the same ring as “peach pie,” or “apple pie,” but please trust me. This is delicious. It's surprisingly rich, plump with sticky fruit and nuts, all wrapped up neatly in a butter crust. Barbara tells me that she first made it for my parents one Thanksgiving at Lake Texoma, back when the Fretwells had a lake house there, decades ago. My father, she says, loved it.

FOR THE CRUST

½ cup ice water, plus more as needed

1½ teaspoons apple cider vinegar

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons sugar

1½ teaspoons salt

2¼ sticks (9 ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

FOR THE FILLING

2 cups pitted prunes, coarsely chopped

2 cups dried apricots, coarsely chopped

1 cup golden raisins

½ cup dried apples, coarsely chopped

¾ cup sugar

1 stick (4 ounces) unsalted butter, melted

½ cup walnuts, chopped

1 large egg

TO SERVE

Lightly sweetened whipped cream

 

TO PREPARE THE CRUST

In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine ½ cup ice water and the cider vinegar.

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Pulse to blend. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles a coarse meal; there should be no pieces of butter bigger than a large pea. With the motor running, slowly add the water-vinegar mixture, processing just until moist clumps form. If you pick up a handful of the
dough and squeeze it in your fist, it should hold together. If the dough seems a bit dry, add more ice water by the teaspoon, pulsing to incorporate. I often find that 2 additional teaspoons is perfect.

Turn the dough out onto a wooden board or clean countertop, and gather it, massaging and pressing, until it just holds together. Shape it into a ball, cut it in half, and press each half into a disk about 1½ inches thick. If the disks crack a bit at the edges, don't worry; just pinch the cracks together as well as you can. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap, and then press them a bit more, massaging away any cracks around the edges, allowing the constraint of the plastic wrap to help you form a smooth circle. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours. (Dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 4 days or sealed in a heavy-duty plastic bag and frozen for up to 1 month. Thaw it in the refrigerator overnight before using.) Before rolling it out, allow the dough to soften slightly at room temperature.

TO PREPARE THE FILLING

Combine the dried fruits in a large saucepan, and add cold water to cover. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain the fruit well in a colander. Return it to the saucepan, and add the sugar and melted butter. Stir well. Set aside to cool, stirring occasionally.

TO FINISH

Set a rack in the lower third of the oven, and preheat the oven to 425°F.

Roll 1 disk of dough into a circle wide enough to fit a 9-or 9½-inch pie plate with a bit of overhang. Transfer gently into the pie plate, pressing it smooth along the bottom and up the sides. If there is a lot of overhang, use scissors or a small, sharp knife to trim it so that it drapes only ¼ to ½ inch beyond the rim of the pie plate. Roll out the second disk of dough into a circle of the same size.

Stir the chopped walnuts into the cooled filling. (It's okay if it's still slightly warm, but it shouldn't be hot.) Scrape the filling into the prepared pie plate, distributing it evenly. Place the second circle of dough atop the filled pie, and fold and pinch the edges over the bottom crust to
seal completely and form a high fluted rim. In a small bowl, beat the egg well with a fork. Brush it lightly over the top and rim of the pie. (You won't use all of the egg—just a little.)